What Are the Most Important Workflows to Monitor in an eCommerce Site?

One of the most common questions we hear from retailers is: “What are the most important workflows to monitor to make sure I’m not losing business on my eCommerce site?”

And while every online store is different, and each has its own unique shopping processes, there are several rules of thumb you should follow to provide yourself with a high level of coverage, without the need to try and monitor each and every page on your site.

While monitoring every nook and cranny isn’t a bad idea, it also isn’t usually necessary. Instead, you want to focus on key pages, important entry points, and critical shopping functionality. Because by monitoring targeted samples of each critical action point on your site, you’ll be covering the majority of your online store, as the same technologies are used throughout the website. For example, when issues appear in one search process, 9 times out of 10 that same issue will affect all search processes.

Let’s first take a look at the essential workflows we recommend all eCommerce companies monitor. 

Important Workflows to Monitor: The Essentials

1. Homepage – Monitoring your homepage is an absolute must. Make sure you know not just that it’s up and running, but that you understand its performance and how customers experience it. As the gateway to your entire site, if there is anything interfering with the shopping experience here, it’s tough to overcome.
2. Best Selling Products – Monitor the top 5-10 products on your site. Make sure shoppers can reach those pages, and that all critical images and information is available to them. Finally, being able to see the product you want is no good if it’s not in stock or there are issues adding it to cart, so make sure the flow leading into and out of these pages is smooth.
3. Most Common Searches – Broken search functionality is one of the most common site issues we see here at Shoppimon. In fact, nearly half of all eCommerce sites will experience search problems in a given month. So monitor your top searches to make sure customers can easily find the products they’re looking for, and prevent them from going elsewhere to find them.
4. Most Popular Categories – Category pages, just like search supports customers in finding what they need, so too do category pages. So make sure they can be easily navigated to, and that products can be selected from each section.
5. Account Login – Giving returning customers the ability to login to an account, access previous purchases, or just speed up the checkout process is must. So monitoring the login function of your site, guarantees your top shoppers can always access the information they need and gives them the frictionless shopping experience they’re looking for.
6. Add to Cart – One of the most common concerns we hear from retailers is about identifying issues adding products to cart. Whether there are problems with the Add to Cart button not appearing on a product page, or technical issues that return users to a previous page from their carts, these issues are surprisingly common and have an immediate impact on revenue. So, we recommend monitoring multiple add to cart workflows, each with different products and through a different approach. This ensures you know about problems like these before sales are lost.
7. Checkout Initiation – Once you’ve ensured products can be added to cart, make sure checkout initiates as expected. A simple way to do this is to add checkout initiation to each of your add to cart processes.

In addition to these essential workflows, you’ll want to extend coverage to include the critical purchase paths that are unique to your website. A few examples of these tailored processes can be seen below.

Important Workflows to Monitor: Custom

1. Complete Checkout – Monitoring the full checkout process is the best way to guarantee shoppers have a successful purchase process, and includes inputting payment and shipping details.
2. Marketing Campaign Conversion – Every marketer’s nightmare is spending thousands of dollars in budget only to find out that there are issues with a landing page or website that prevent customers from leveraging the deal that’s on offer. Monitoring from a landing page all the way through checkout is the best way to ensure that never occurs.
3. Coupon Code Confirmation – Double check that coupon codes work and sale prices appear as promised to avoid frustrated shoppers and last minute abandoned carts.
4. Age Verification – If your products are restricted to purchases by customers above a specific legal age, ensure that you are 100% aligned with all regulations by double checking that age verification works as necessary.
5. Language and Location Selection – Products and offers may change based on a customer’s location and preferred language. Make sure to check that they are easily able to add their preferences and see all of the relevant products and sales unique to their location.

Shoppimon is designed to automate the process of setting up and configuring workflows like the ones we’ve covered here. But whether you’re using an AI-based solution like ours, running manual checks or looking to script your own, knowing you have the necessary level of coverage is essential.

So what about you? What workflows are an absolute must for you to monitor in your site? Tell us in the comments below!